Posts Tagged ‘Paideia Institute’

At an early hour on a Saturday, January 9, I tumbled out of bed to listen to poet and classicist A.M. Juster talk about his translation of John Milton‘s short Book of Elegies, published by the Paideia Institute. (We wrote about his translations of Maximianus here.) Mike Juster has the chops for it: long ago, he graduated magna cum laude from Roxbury Latin School. He was only a few years younger then as the Milton who wrote the elegies.

These Latin elegies were youthful efforts, and most poets dismiss what they later consider juvenilia. Milton was no exception. You can tell because the older Milton writes a postscripted poem to the collection that begins with an apology for the younger self who wrote the poems. “He doesn’t say which poems make him squirm,” Juster said. “You can see from his use of the word ‘nequitiae’ — which I’ve translated as vileness — that he’s making some pretty harsh judgments about his own work. It’s definitely a kind of defensive preemptive strike.”

“These are primarily poems that were written while he was an undergraduate, and by the time that he’s pulling the poemata together, he’s probably 36. Now most of us have some embarrassment in middle age about our teenage poetry, but I think that this sort of half vague apology may be a little bit more complicated.”

His “apology” from the untitled postscript:

From a perverse persistence and contrariness,

I once made pointless trophies to my vileness.

At the time of the elegies, he’d been kicked out or “sent down” from Christ’s College, Cambridge. We don’t know exactly why. As Juster explains in the introduction, Milton’s strict tutor, the bishop-to-be William Chappell, may have beaten him for an infraction. Milton was overjoyed to be sent home.

To bear a callous master’s threats and other things

Repugnant to my nature does not please me.

If this is “exile” – back again with household gods

And seeking welcome leisure free of care –

I have not shunned the label, nor protest my lot,

And gladly celebrate my exiled state.

“Then it gets more interesting. Elegies 1 and 6 are epistolary poems to the great love of John Milton’s life: Charles Diodati.” Was the bard gay? Don’t jump to conclusions. Juster continues: “I think he was just a lonely young man who had one strong friendship that started in grammar school, and that he never formed such a bond again with other men or his three wives. In these two elegies, you see a warm even wryly funny Milton. The formal prose adopted in almost all his other work is dropped, and you see him I think fairly clearly as he was at the time.”

“This Milton surprises even scholars. He tells Diodati about his many trips to the theater, but most scholarly opinion until fairly recently discounted this observation and assumed that they were secondhand based on the older Milton’s contempt for theater. Only with the discovery that Milton’s father was a part owner of London’s Blackfriars Theater plus the discovery of Milton’s heavily annotated first folio of Shakespeare did most scholars accept the truth was more complicated than they had believed.” [Curiously, I attended last month the Milton’s Cottage Annual lecture, “Re-reading Milton Re-reading Shakespeare” on precisely that topic. Let’s hope the zoom discussion goes online soon. – CH]

“Milton clearly had extensive firsthand knowledge of the theater, just as he told us in this elegy. The language of these elegies should also knock some comfortable assumptions about Milton.”

“Too often we see Milton as inevitably destined to be an epic poet, but there’s in fact really nothing in the Book of Elegies that would reinforce that view. Not only did he use Ovid‘s elegiac couplets instead of Virgil‘s dactylic hexameter, he compares the two great poets and comes down — perhaps jokingly, but still — on the side of Ovid as the greater of the two. Well, pursuit of poetic greatness in Latin poetry necessitated an eventual epic, and of course Milton knew that. The young Milton clearly reveled in the language and imagination of its mythology and romance to a greater extent than the battle scenes from the Aeneid. Milton also repeatedly looks to Ovid by adopting and adapting imagery from Tristia and presenting himself as an exile.”

You can get the short bilingual Book of Elegies, published by the Paideia Institute here.